


sailing to byzantium

by downthedarkpath



Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Purple Prose, Spaceships!, cerebral, introspective, life and death, prose, sci fi, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26806732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downthedarkpath/pseuds/downthedarkpath
Summary: Dream stands next to him, staring at the same sky. He still feels a million miles away, when George turns to watch him. His face is awash in pink and orange and gold, bleeding between the locks of his hair and across the planes of his cheeks. He’s beautiful, this much George knows.
Relationships: Dream/George - Relationship
Comments: 10
Kudos: 79





	sailing to byzantium

**Author's Note:**

> title from [sailing to byzantium](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium) by wb yeats.
> 
> there is also a quote from that poem, as well as one from [byzantium](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43296/byzantium) by yeats because i just fuckin love the byzantium poems SO MUCH.
> 
> hope u like!!!!

Here, they stand.

Outside, the sun is low and bright and slow, setting like molten amber across a sky that is just out of reach. George presses his hand against the glass like he could touch it. 

He leaves a handprint on the pane, one that exists merely as a phantom, as a memory. He watches it as it disappears, and resists the urge to press upon the windows again.

Dream stands next to him, staring at the same sky. He still feels a million miles away, when George turns to watch him. His face is awash in pink and orange and gold, bleeding between the locks of his hair and across the planes of his cheeks. He’s beautiful, this much George knows.

“We can’t come back here,” Dream says. He says the words like he holds power over them, like he controls their existence. George admires it, admires the stoicism in the tension of his shoulders and the line of his back. He stands like a man on the brink of war.

And yet he bends, and shows George his throat.

“No,” George agrees. The sun, held in it’s sky, is burning. They are watching it live out it’s last moments, honouring its last breath. Once it is over, this sky will be no more than a wasteland, burnt through and empty, life torn mercilessly from it’s grasp.

Dream reaches for his hand. George lets him take it, lets their fingers curl together. “It’s beautiful, though,” Dream says, he whispers, like they are words he isn’t supposed to be saying. Or perhaps, they are words that don’t belong to him, words that are said so quietly so as to not upset the balance of whatever universe is left to them. George feels their resonance all through his chest.

“Yes,” George says. He isn’t sure what to say. Nothing could do it justice. Here, death is a mercy, a salvation, and an art. It is a disguise, and a beauty, and a hundred more things. 

Pink turns a bleeding red, pouring from the gaps in the clouds like poison. George imagines one drop could burn through skin and bone, like a venom. He wishes he might hold a bowl below it, that he might draw it from the sky and keep it in memoriam.

He feels Dream turn to face him. His eyes on George’s face have some physical presence, pressing in towards his skin like they could see right through him. Dream inhales, and then exhales once. His breath reaches over George’s cheeks, pulling itself over with clawed fingertips. He says, “you’re beautiful,” and George finds himself believing it.

He looks down. He stares at the welding between the window frames and the floor of their ship. Gunmetal grey and magma, molten in the dying light. When George closes his eyes, red floods his eyelids. “Don’t.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

The star before them begins to splinter. “I wouldn’t,” Dream says. His truth is obvious, but soured. George knows this, knows Dream wouldn’t, couldn’t, lie. Not to him.

He exhales. “More beautiful than this?”

He sees Dream glance at the same welding he’s looking at, and then back up at the sky. “Always,” he says.

“You lie then,” George accuses.

“Not to you.”

He waits a minute before saying, “not to me,” and he says it quietly. Their star is broken into pieces.

George hears Dream breathe. He feels the pulse of blood through Dream’s fingertips. He listens when Dream recites, letting the words hang before them, “ _It knows not what it is; and gather me/Into the artifice of eternity._ ”

“An eternity is too cruel.”

“Cruel?” Dream asks. His pulse beats once more.

“Death is what makes life,” George says. “Eternity is forever, and we live for so little of it. It’s too short for cruelty.”

Dream speaks once more, taking his words, “ _And all complexities of fury leave/Dying into a dance/An agony of trance/An agony of flame._ ”

George takes his hand from Dream’s, and places it once more on the windows. He leaves another handprint, one that stays for a moment longer than the last.

“It’s all still temporary,” Dream says, once the last of the fog has gone from the handprint. “You see? Cruelty is not forever.”

“Is kindness?”

“That’s a choice to be made alone.”

“What choice do you make?” George asks. He’s unsure of the answer, and unsure of what he himself might say to it.

Dream sighs. He’s silent for a long while. “I would choose to love you,” he says. The sun is nothing more than a remnant, just crushed rock and gas. They are far enough away to avoid its gravity. “I do choose to love you.”

“Would you choose not to?” he says. He looks at Dream again. The sky has darkened. There is no flame to light it’s way, and the hollows of Dream’s face are deeper, set in stone. George looks and looks, letting his eyes walk across the expanse of Dream’s body until he can no longer see in the lowlight.

“No,” Dream says. “I would consider you fate.”

“An inevitability?”

“A constant,” Dream corrects. “Here, feeling your heart beat beneath my hands. Knowing the bird that flutters behind your ribcage is trapped, for now, until the cruelty of eternity frees it. Or so you say.”

“Or so I say,” George repeats. “For what worth it holds, I feel your heart beneath mine too. Your pulse in my fingertips. I would choose to love you as much as I would never choose not to.”

“You are not as cruel as your eternity,” Dream says.

“I still trap my bird.”

“It’s not down to you to free it.”

“Then whose job is it?” George asks. He’s accusatory now; the darkness of the sky, the loss of the planet, is enough to stoke the fire within his stomach.

“The eternity you claim is so cruel,” Dream tells him. “Your entrapment might be a freedom.”

“Is it worth it?”

“You’ll have to find out,” Dream says. He sighs and leans forward to rest his head upon the window pane. “Today, we stand here, before the ending of a universe. We watch the death and birth of life with our naked eye.”

“A cruel eventuality,” George says for him, before the letters are stolen by the spirits of the sun. 

“But merciful,” Dream says. “Surely, that’s all we might ask for?”

“Mercy?”

Dream nods. “A merciful honour. A cruel freedom, yes. But an honour all the same.”

**Author's Note:**

> these are some words. i hope they were goodish.
> 
> i havent done much writing in the past ehhhhhh 3 months but idk, im working on stuff. life is hard and writing is hard and motivation is also hard! :D
> 
> thanks for reading. let me kno some thoughts, if ur about that?


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